Physicians, in Film, Decry Embargo's Effect on Iraqi Children

By MARJORIE KAUFMAN

Published: December 27, 1992

FOR most Americans, the war in Iraq is over. But for the children of Iraq, said Dr. Michael Viola, director of oncology at University Hospital at Stony Brook, the war continues with savage intensity.

Dr. Viola said the real problem was in the continuing United Nations embargo. Although Americans have been told that the embargo exempts medical supplies and that the lack of supplies may be caused by the military's diverting them from the public, Dr. Viola said:

"We know this is simply not true. We know that there is just not enough coming in. Along with the International Red Cross and Unicef, we follow the shipments coming in of the medicines and supplies. We found that only 5 percent of the need is coming into the country. The fact remains that because of this situation many children have died and more continue to die."

In 1990, Dr. Viola and the Rev. Gerald Twomey, who was then a priest at St. James Roman Catholic Church in Setauket, co-founded Medicine for Peace as a nondenominational relief group to send medical supplies to villages in El Salvador. The organization has grown to include hundreds of physicians, mostly from the East Coast. Committees of five to 10 physicians give medical expertise to countries where civilians suffer from the ravages of war.

Dr. Viola and others made their first trip to Iraq in one terrifying week in June 1991 to document the civilian medical situation in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war. They returned in October and said the country remained in chaos, with conditions comparable to a biblical famine.

With Dr. William LiPera, an oncologist from Smithtown who was a film maker in his college days, and Daniel Loghran, a cameraman, they have produced a 30-minute documentary, "Children of the Cradle," which won a humanitarian award at the Suffolk Film Festival this year and will be shown on Connecticut public television this week. Immune to Consequences of War

"We are physicians, not politicians," Dr. Viola said. "We are more concerned with issues and problems that face the medical profession like the medical issue of treating civilian victims of war and the net effect of embargoes, which is that poor people, especially children, will die because of them."

Medicine for Peace went to Baghdad on the heels of a group of physicians from Harvard University who reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that the death rate among Iraqi children rose dramatically in the months after the coalition of troops led by the United States drove Iraq from Kuwait. The resarchers said the deaths resulted largely from severed diarrhea and malnutrition caused by malfunctioning water and sewage systems.

In his first trip, Dr. Viola said, the morgues were so full of children that their bodies were put in the backyard and guarded at night, to prevent wild dogs from attacking the corpses.

When Dr. Viola returned to one of the largest hospitals in Baghdad in October, he said, he found little change at the crippled institution.

Medicine for Peace says children were especially affected, because Iraqis do not customarily breast feed and most milk is imported. When bombs reportedly destroyed a major milk factory and water-purification plants, the principal source of pure water, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, also became contaminated. Raw sewage was in the streets, and no water, and then infected water, had to be mixed with powdered milk to feed the children, Dr. Viola said. Letter, Antibiotics and Water

Infectious malnutrition caused kwashiorkor, an advanced form of protein deficiency, that became widespread, along with marasmus, or progressive emaciation from advanced malnutrition, he added.

Although the United States Government discouraged them from traveling to Iraq, the physicians obtained visas and left for Iraq with antibiotics, bottled water and a letter of introduction to the Health Ministry from the Iraqi representative at the United Nations. They drove for 12 hours through 650 miles of desert in the middle of the night in 120-degree heat from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad.

Dr. LiPera said he was shocked when he reached a children's cancer ward in one of the four hospitals that the group visited. Before the war, physicians assured him, the children had received chemotherapy, but no such drugs had reached the wards since the allied embargo. The children in remission had relapsed, Dr. LiPera said, and there was no relief from the pain.

"I remember at one point in the ward holding the videocamera and feeling so guilty, knowing there was nothing I could do," Dr. LiPera recounted. "They were all going to die. I still see their faces." 30-Minute Documentary

Dr. LiPera edited "Children of the Cradle" after returning, winnowing hours of film of dehydrated children into the documentary. A mutual friend of Martin Sheen, the actor and advocate for the homeless, was told about the report, and Mr. Sheen agreed to narrate the film free.

Bits of footage were shown on national television newscasts in July 1991, and the documentary was shown at the United Nations, to mixed reactions.